This story from New Mexico demonstrates both the fallacy of the drug abuse as a victimless crime meme and the danger of, as Dr. Deborah Schurman-Kauflin put it, importing misogyny from violent failed states. Via Fox News:
SANTA FE, N.M. — A Santa Fe man is accused of kidnapping and raping a 19-year-old Espanola woman police say he considered his “property” after her brother traded her for heroin.
Herman Flores Jr., 24, has been charged in Santa Fe County Magistrate Court with criminal sexual penetration and in Rio Arriba County Magistrate Court with kidnapping, aggravated burglary and threatening or intimidating a witness.
Flores apparently considered the woman his possession and wanted her to bear his children, Espanola police Detective Christian Lopez said.
“It is bizarre,” Lopez said. “I’ve not heard of this happening before.”
According to a police report, the woman’s boyfriend called Espanola police March 28 to report she had sent him text messages that morning that she was being taken against her will and might be killed.
Espanola police discovered she was with Flores and tracked him to his grandmother’s home in La Cienega.
The woman told Lopez she met Flores last September when her brother “was in dire need of narcotics,” according to the police report. The brother got drugs from Flores but couldn’t pay, and told Flores he could have his sister “and ‘do whatever he wanted with her’ because she was his property now,” Lopez’s report said.
The woman told police it wasn’t the first time her brother traded her for drugs but that he’d never given “full custody” of her before. Previously, “she would have to go with the males that he would trade her to and then she would be released,” police said.
The woman told police she could not flee from Flores “and was told on numerous occasions that she was going to (bear) his children because she was now Herman’s,” the report said.
After Flores was arrested on outstanding warrants last October, the woman was forced to stay with his family, but managed to escape. She stayed in touch with Flores until December, when she wrote him to say she could not be with him anymore, Lopez said.
Often we hear people claim that if an addict isn’t robbing or mugging anyone then his or her addiction is his or her business, but those that make such specious claims have no idea how nightmarish the world of hardcore drug use is. Years of addiction to mind altering substances impair not only a person’s judgment, but their morality and ability to empathize with others.
Combine this with an unassimilated, misogynistic culture that insulates itself from the mainstream and you have the perfect recipe for abuse. Herman Flores may be the man arrested for this crime but understand that two families and countless other men all violated this poor girl. Flores’ family held the girl captive in his stead and her own brother forced her to prostitute herself with random strangers.
And who were these other men who violated this teen? Not one of them felt it was wrong? No one in this situation sought to put a stop to this abuse?
Drug abuse takes a toll on our communities, our country and more importantly our souls. It is time we admitted that to our children, that people who spent a lifetime getting high are probably untrustworthy, morally impaired and unable to function normally. Then we can work on the real problems that face us, like promoting assimilation into America where individuals are free and cannot be traded like property.
